Guaranteed leads. Guaranteed lies.

I remember the first time I bought a lead generation service with a guarantee.

It was one of those content syndication things.

As a young-ish digital marketer, it seemed great.

I was managing paid media, web and SEO at Convoy. We were generating plenty of great leads from LinkedIn Ads for the enterprise side of the business, but we had a big list of target accounts and it was tough to break into most of them. Along comes a vendor, with a guaranteed minimum number of leads per month, and we only pay for the quality ones.

What could go wrong?

…

I have bought a lot of lead gen and pipe gen and SDR and outsourced sales services in the last decade.

90% of the time things have not worked out.

So first, I’ll share what I’ve learned. Second, I’ll share why this matters for buyers of TitanX.

What the scars of buying lead gen offerings have taught me:

1. You can’t outsource your experiment design. The wisdom of ICP and PMF and messaging must be cultivated as an in-house asset. You, revenue leader, need to know the philosophical parts of your GTM better than anyone else. Listen to calls. Talk to your prospects. Talk to your customers.
2. But you can outsource the running of those experiments. Execution of some part of your outbound is absolutely worth outsourcing, depending on where your org is at financially. It massively reduces the risk of hiring in-house, and allows you to build a baseline set of understandings for hiring in-house (e.g. ACV, conversion rates, quota, the stuff that lets you build a model).
3. A/B test outbound vendors. Never buy one. Buy two or three. Tell them they’re competing. But also give them distinct lists. Then swap lists after a couple months to compare how they perform against the same list. You can’t control every variable but you can control the targeting and testing.
4. (Biggest one) Make sure you have 2-3 experts from your ICP informing messaging. Often when I see a founder, CMO or CRO hire a lead gen vendor and look at the script, the messaging is way off. If you sell to developers, try the script/message on a couple friendly developers. “Ew, that sounds like the wrong jargon” and “I’ve never heard that acronym before in my life” - these are things you want to hear before launching.

You’ll notice how proactive you have to be to make lead gen vendors work. You can’t “set-it-and-forget-it” - you have to coach them, counsel them, regularly, and they should be doing the same for you. Much like hiring someone in-house, actually.

This is the approach TitanX takes with its customers. We don’t just hand you a list with super high quality phone data and expect you to figure out what to do with it. We diagnose your dialer, your callers, your script even.

As Kevin Dorsey puts it, TitanX is not just “a data provider. They came up on the phones, they were born on the phones. They make the dials. They are truly consulting people on how to be better on the phones.”

Buyers of TitanX beware…

People are often skeptical of the promises we make. We can triple your connect rates. We deliver 3x more conversations with prospects, from 50% fewer dials.

So much that we made a reel just of the skepticism.

It’s really entertaining. But it speaks to the experience I’ve had - and I’m sure many of you have had - hiring vendors with big promises who can’t deliver. We’ve all been burned, so we’re cautious.

“I put them through the ringer in the proof of concept”

We’ve all been burned. The problem is, most GTM organizations are burning down around them.

How to put out the GTM fire without getting burned:

I’m not sure that’s possible, honestly. If you take our advice, you’ll be hiring less and maybe even reducing headcount because of how much more efficient your top funnel motion becomes.

The biggest thing you need to avoid is buying more of the same. Cheap data, sequencers and dialers that do nothing for deliverability, and bulk import approaches to accounts, contacts and messaging.

Don’t drive the car while it’s busted. And don’t wait to take it to the shop.

Think like a mechanic: Zero in on the fix.

Think like a doctor: Eliminate the variables to figure out which ones are truly pathological.

Think like a parent: This is your baby. And if you don’t take care of it, who will?

From a practical standpoint, break down the inner workings of your outbound calling with the help of Disposition Science.

Each playbook and channel requires that level of attention to detail to get it humming. Especially at scale.

And while you can’t afford to hire the wrong vendor or team or resource to fix your top funnel velocity, you also can’t afford to do nothing.

Think like NASA mission control: even just slightly off course puts you millions of miles away from your destination.

“Slightly off course” means death.

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)